The Quiet Turning:
Poems from the far side of belief, memory, and loss.
Now Available
in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle
These poems were written across twelve years.
They begin in certainty and end somewhere quieter.
Not with answers.
With something more honest.
Featured Poems
After the Body
They are no longer here
in the way we understand here.
Something has loosened.
Not vanished.
Not gone.
Only released
from the form that held it.
What we called a life
gathers itself differently now.
It is not upward,
not elsewhere.
It is a change in pressure,
like air after a storm,
when everything is the same
and not the same.
We try to follow.
We imagine distance,
arrival,
some field where all is made clear.
But what if it is closer than that.
What if it has not gone far enough
to be named.
A warmth remains
where a body had been.
A shape in memory
that does not stay still.
You feel it sometimes
without warning.
Not as grief,
but as a shift.
As if something were continuing
without needing you
to understand it.
We want an answer.
Instead we are given
this movement.
This quiet rearranging
of what was certain.
And the sense,
not provable,
not finished,
that nothing has ended,
only changed its way
of being held.
The Poet’s Soul
Perhaps I have this kind of life
where feeling does not arrive cleanly.
In the same hour
there is something like joy,
and something like pain.
They do not take turns.
They stand together
in the body.
I used to think
the soul wanted purity,
some quiet place
untouched.
But that is not true.
It wants rest.
Sometimes
it imagines this as God.
More often
it is simpler than that.
The body beside mine.
Her breathing
in the dark.
My wife,
who came from another country
and made a place for me in it.
There,
the feeling does not divide.
What hurts
and what opens
are the same place.
Desire looks out
over its own distance
and does not turn away.
All the names fall off.
There is only this,
one life,
felt completely,
as though every grief
and every moment of brightness
had been gathered
into a single tear.
From the Collection
First Language
Faith is not strange.
It does not ask you
to believe what is not there.
It is more like this.
You have been away
a long time,
and then one morning
you find yourself
on a familiar path.
The trees do not question you.
The light falls
as it always did.
Something in you loosens.
When it was done
there was no signal,
no marked ending.
Only the fact
that I was outside it…
A Cold Fact
At some point the struggle ended.
Not with triumph.
Simply with the recognition
that the night does not answer prayer.
Truth stood there
as mountains stand in winter,
not hostile, not kind,
only present.
And slowly I understood
that its silence was not directed at me.
The world sheds its decorations quickly.
Roses darken and collapse into themselves.
The songs of mothers fade into rooms
where no one listens anymore…
After Prayer
I went where the light was arranged
to resemble mercy.
Candles, the slow lift of smoke,
a voice rising just enough
to make you think something was listening.
I knelt because I knew how.
The body remembers
what the mind has begun to doubt.
For a moment there was relief,
not peace exactly,
but a loosening,
as if the self could be set down
and left there.
It did not last.
The words I spoke
fell back through me
like water through open hands.
Nothing held.
I had called it hunger for God.
I had called it longing…
The collection continues beyond this moment.